New native rig help requested.

Logician

After what feels like a gazillion years of using a Dual G5/HD3 TDM rig with Logic/ESB I am about to upgrade/crossgrade to a (hopefully) all singing, all dancing Mac Pro/Symphony rig.

I have finally faced up to much preferring Logic over Protools and I am probably correct in thinking that a native rig will do everything I need to do these days.
The ESB has never really worked for me but I stuck with it forever.

Finally looking forward to being able to use a single audio

So... I request some assistance if I may.
First question is how powerful in real world terms is a single processor/4 core Mac Pro?

I am looking to be able to run large 100 track sessions on a regular basis.
Most of my sessions seem to be around 40-50 tracks.
Not looking at PCIe based processing (UAD etc).

Will a single processor do it or am I better off stumping for a dual?

Tp begin with I am looking for a Rosetta 200 or 800 with a Symphony card and then expand to multiple AD16/DA16 when budget allows.

What sort of latency can I expect with the AD/DA16s recording 16 tracks at once.
VI's are DHF Superior, Trillium, RMX, all of the Rob Papens & NI's.
I'm mostly producing electronic rock music and some electro-breaks

I'm happy working at 24/44.1 mostly but can I get decent performance at 24/96?

I haven't use a native rig in around 8 years (except for a mobile MBP rig that I don't mix on).
I have a vague inkling of what they can do (a lot, it seems) but I'd like to hear from people who are using them.

Administrator

First of all, I hasten to say that I am not familar with PT HD systems. But I did switch from a G5 2 x 2.5 to the original Dual Quad Mac Pro back in 2007. The difference was very substantial, not just in terms of the load the Mac pro could bear in terms of Processing, tracks, native plugins etc, but also latency. Projects that drove the G5 to its limits, and started to cause audio break up below 512 samples, barely cause the Mac Pro to flinch, and are absolutely no trouble at 64 samples.

I think you should be OK with a single processor machine, but if you can stretch to it, a dual might be more economical in the long term - meaning, you may get a year or two more out of having 8 cores than 4. I think it is also worth bearing in mind that Apple are getting better at fine tuning their software for multi core systems, and as there may soon be 12 core machines, this is an area they will presumably continue to work on further improving.

Tp begin with I am looking for a Rosetta 200 or 800 with a Symphony card and then expand to multiple AD16/DA16 when budget allows.

What sort of latency can I expect with the AD/DA16s recording 16 tracks at once.
VI's are DHF Superior, Trillium, RMX, all of the Rob Papens & NI's.
I'm mostly producing electronic rock music and some electro-breaks

I'm happy working at 24/44.1 mostly but can I get decent performance at 24/96?

I can record, overdub and mix quite happily on my Mac, either with 24 bit 44,1 or. more recent projects have been at 88,2, typically with latencies of 64 samples. I am using metric halo Firewire hardware, which in terms of FW is really as good as it gets. At the same time, a PCIe system - in particular, the Apogee Symphony - should give slightly better latency performance.

Administrator

Jim, at least as important as those extra four cores is to have or at least plan for plenty of RAM, all the more so in anticipation of 64 bit AUs and virtually unlimited RAM usage. In particular as you write that you are relying on samples, lots of RAM will make lots of sense